Now that at least one state has mandated the use of the OpenDocument format, there may be more interest than ever before in StarOffice.

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday shipped StarOffice 8, the latest version of its desktop productivity suite. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said the product is the first commercial office suite to support the OpenDocument format, which is designed to ease data flow among applications and upgrades.

OpenDocument has been at the center of an ongoing dispute between Microsoft and Massachusetts. The state has threatened to move its agencies from Microsoft Office to other applications if Microsoft does not support the OpenDocument format.

StarOffice 8 is based on OpenOffice 2.0 but adds new enterprise management perks and a Visual Basic Applications (VBA) macro converter, said Iyer Venkatesan, product line manager at Sun. The Macro Migration Wizard helps convert macros written in VBA code, a key feature given that many businesses virtually run on Excel macros. Word macros also are common.

Does anyone have any insight on when OpenOffice.org 2.0 might get released? Beta 2 is only about a month old. I hope this duo of a more funtional user friendly StarOffice/OpenOffice.org takes off and actually competes with Microsoft. MS Office is a decent product but it is way over priced. OpenOffice.org is excellent for the price!!!